Homelab: 2 Tiny 24 Core virtualization Computation with hacked hardware

For some time, a good way to get cheap and powerful computers, outside of cutting-edge gaming or single-core heft, has been to get used server CPUs. There is even an interesting hardware-hacking community around this practice coming out of China, where chipsets are removed from old server computers and attached to brand new custom motherboards, allowing some delightfully unintended uses for server processors. You see, a lot of corporate computation often upgrade masses of computers at a time letting go of the leftovers for quite silly money, for instance what I use here cost when new $2.949 (and there is two of them so double this price), now 8years later, you can buy them for $80 or less each… This is a crazy world.

Well, after letting that sink in a bit, it is possible to run a machine such as this, with 24cores 48threads, at 2.5Ghz base 3.5Ghz boost using a hardware hacked motherboard, in a case not much larger than your regular shoe-box.  Simplified, that’s about the power of 6 individual laptops of today 2021, perfect for virtual servers and machine-learning, any computation that can be parallelized and does not work on GPU’s. As far as the case go, it had ventilation with far to few openings so required some cutting and installing fan grilles, as well as reorienting flow and adding a fan to the bottom, making a 20C change.

This incredible thing here is in a sub Micro-ATX formfactor, containing the same sockets that usually require a massive server motherboard, hacked together from new and scrounged parts. Sometimes the most fun engineering are not found in cutting edge things.

Homelab: 4 Family & apartment friendly server cabinet

Homelab: 3 Turning laptops into mini-servers

Homelab: 1 25 Year old computer as a firewall: 60Mbps throughput